Dictionary of the Turkic Languages: English : Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uighur, Uzbek

Rating:
Summary: Great for those interested in linguisitcs!
Review: The first time I saw this book was in Turkey, where I saw an earlier edition published by the government. This edition is much more complete, and contains several previously omitted languages. The vocabulary included is pretty mundane, but the book is nevertheless an indispensible tool for those interested in Turkic linguistics. The format is especially friendly in this manner, with rows and columns to enable quick comparisons.

Rating:
Summary: great although a little strange
Review: This is a dictionary organized by English words, with for each word the equivalent in each of the 8 Turkic languages. It's not a complete dictionary because it only has about 2000 words, but that is plenty for many purposes. Then in the back, it has an alphabetical listing of the words for each language (e.g. a listing of all the Azerbaijani words in alphabetical order, a listing of all the Kirghiz words in alphabetical order etc. It is nicely laid out, well printed and easy to use. The entries have very little information and are really just a list of words without any examples or grammatical explanations. Thus it will be most useful for those who already know at least one of these languages or are studying one. If you are interested in Turkic languages, this is the easiest way I know of to see vocabulary comparisons between them quickly. So just browsing in this book is quite interesting. The similarities (and differences) between these languages are fascinating. And if you already know one of these languages and are traveling somewhere where a different one of these languages is used, this book is extremely helpful and is not too large to take along. For many (most?) of these languages, it's hard to find a good dictionary (for instance there is only one Uzbek-English dictionary that I know of and it has a lot of limitations), so this book is a good equivalent. I have the hardback edition and one caution is it uses the Cyrillic script for languages such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek etc (with a phonetic transcription so you dont have to actually know how to read the Cyrillic script), but now these languages are switching over to Latin script. So it would be nice to have the words written in the official Latin script for that language because there are minor variants from one to the other. However this should not pose too many problems because the scripts are all fairly phonetic. This book is recommended to anyone interested in Turkic languages.

Rating:
Summary: Incorrect transliteration tables
Review: This is an excellent book as an overview of the language. The problem is that the Latin transliterations for the Turkmen and Uzbek alphabets are entirely wrong from the third character to the end. I work in a library, and had consulted this book while cataloging some Uzbek and Kazakh books, when I noticed the error. This is not useful to librarians or anyone studying these languages. If there has been an errata published for the transliteration tables, it needs to be made readily available.